Mold-maker Given Loans To Keep Company In State

Deal Keeps Mold-maker In State

October 22, 1992|By W. JOSEPH CAMPBELL; Courant Staff Writer

Murray A. Gerber is one of Connecticut's best-known, and most outspoken, small-business leaders. For months, Gerber pondered whether to move the company he founded almost 25 years ago from Middletown to someplace in the South, where business costs are less.

True to form, Gerber didn't refrain from saying so.

His openness, he has suggested, probably helped spur negotiations with state officials about how to keep the company, Prototype & Plastic Mold Co. Inc., in Connecticut. Those negotiations intensified during the summer and culminated late Wednesday morning in a 30-minute ceremony at Prototype's 12-year-old plant.

Gerber, the governor, the economic development commissioner, the Middletown mayor and other public officials as well as about 50 Prototype employees got together to celebrate a $1 million package of financial incentives that prevents a move to the South.

Gerber said the incentives to Prototype were less than what Southern states had offered. He didn't go into detail, however.

But Gerber, a former chairman of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, described the decision to stay as "a win-win situation for the state ... and for our company. ... It's a win-win situation because, for the state, it retains a high-wage, high-tech, high value-added, safe, environmentally clean, growing company."

The company, which employs 65 people and has nearly $6 million in sales, "gets some reduced costs [and] the capital to expand and grow," Gerber said.

The package includes two loans, totaling $785,000, from the Connecticut Development Authority, the financing arm of the Department of Economic Development. The department made available a separate loan of $120,000, and a grant of $150,000, both under the Manufacturing Assistance Act.

In addition, Connecticut Light & Power Co. agreed to sell electricity to Prototype at reduced rates for four years.

The financial inducements were enough, Gerber said, to put an

end to a situation in which the company found itself "considering doing something that it really did not want to do," which was move to the South.

Gerber had made it clear that such a prospect was quite real. In April he visited South Carolina, Virginia and Maryland, and planned a swing through western Virginia, western South Carolina and Georgia in July. He put off that trip, partly because he wanted to allow negotiations with the state to progress.

Though successful in the end, the negotiations were not always harmonious. Joseph J. McGee, the economic development commissioner, acknowledged at Wednesday's ceremony that there was "tension ... at times." "So ... if anybody thinks that this is just two old friends getting together, passing the money back and forth, you can forget it," said Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., drawing guffaws from Gerber and several others